April 29th, 2024
Rationalism is the secret of Western success. Few people appreciate just how special our rationalism is. In the entire history of human societies, only one has stumbled upon rationalism: the West. And the sequence of events leading up to the development of rationalism by the West reads like some sort of Rube Goldberg intellectual contraption. Rationalism gave us a leg up on mathematics, a superior capitalistic system, science, more effective governmental systems, and technology. We owe our happy condition to rationalism. It catapulted Western civilization to the dominant position in humanity. 130 years ago, most of the world was under Western control.
The rest of the world, realizing the power of Western thinking, has rushed to adopt it, but has not done well. They have succeeded best in technology, copying much of the technology we developed. They did this by sending their best and brightest students to Western universities to learn Western science, and they have done a fairly good job at this. They have copied many other aspects of Western culture: our clothing styles, the vocabulary (but not the substance) of our political systems, and even some of our music. But overall, only one non-Western society has pulled off the transformation: Japan. The reasons for Japan’s success are unique to that culture and not within the purview of this essay.
Rationalism is alien to the human mind; it does not come naturally to us. To learn it, we must put our brains through an intensive mind-twisting educational process that entails a great deal more than classwork; rationalism must be part of the culture, too. Only a deeply rational culture and imbue its members with honest rationalism.
The basic methodology of rationalism was nailed down over 2,000 years ago by Aristotle, sharpened over 700 years ago by the Scholastics, and combined with quantification about 500 years ago by the Western merchant class. It’s simple enough in principle: combine logic with evidence to produce reliable conclusions. In practice, though, it can be difficult to pull off. The American Constitution was written by a group of dedicated rationalists. “Children of the Enlightenment” some scholars have called them. Realizing that rationalism is the philosophy of the educated, they limited the franchise to a small fraction of the population, fearing that the hoi poloi would ruin their delicately balanced, deeply rational design. But over the years, the demands of legitimacy forced the hands of the governing elite, and the common citizenry was awarded the vote.
So now we have a body politic driven by the animal urges of the irrational. One need only look at the support the Mr. Trump enjoys. He appeals to the basest, darkest elements of the human psyche and wins the votes of millions. No rational person would ever support Mr. Trump, yet he won the Presidency once and seems well-positioned to take it a second time. What compelling proof of the irrationalism of the American people! Observe how often people become emotionally aroused by disagreements over facts. Associated with this is the complete abandonment of intellectual humility. When the authors of the Constitution designed our government, their society was clearly stratified into an elite and the hoi poloi; this latter group accepted the convention that they were not qualified to make political decisions. They had their opinions, of course, but accepted their inferior position as a proper aspect of society.
Nowadays, we reject this convention and hold that all citizens are equal in rights, and that nobody should be given power over others without the proper selection process.
We have gone too far. Discussion groups on the Internet teem with comments from people who blithely reject the expertise of those who have devoted their lives to studying a problem. We have nitwits who deny climate science without actually knowing anything about basic physics. Others insist that vaccines are neither safe nor effective, despite knowing next to nothing about immunology or even basic biology. I have learned enough about the world to respect the expertise of people who have devoted far more time to their subjects than I have.
Most Americans have abandoned rationalism, or perhaps never learned how to be rational. I am certain that 1) the authors of the Constitution would be horrified by the state of our body politic; and 2) the American republic has reached the limits of its life and must needs collapse. Rationalism made the West great. Irrationalism will be its doom.